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50 Years of Research on Islam and West African History a Literature Review by David Robinson, Michigan State University

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50 Years of Research on Islam and West African History a Literature Review by David Robinson, Michigan State University RESEARCH AFRICA REVIEWS Volume 4 (2020) Page 5 Research Africa Reviews Vol. 4 No. 2, August 2020 These reviews may be found on the RA Reviews website at: https://sites.duke.edu/researchafrica/ra-reviews/volume-2-issue-2-aug-2020/. 50 Years of Research on Islam and West African History A Literature Review by David Robinson, Michigan State University. In composing this, I am struck by the remarkable good fortune I had of working with so many outstanding and generous collaborators over the years; African, European and North American, as I labored on the history of Senegal and Mali. Those collaborators included informants, guides, intermediaries, translators, graduate students and fellow researchers. Actually, I should say close to 60 years of experience, if not research, in and on West Africa. Let me explain. It began for me in a work camp in Huguenot country in southern France, midway through college. The sponsor was the World Council of Churches, and it was 1958, after my sophomore year at Davidson College. About 15 of us were rebuilding dry walls in an old refugee camp of the Huguenots, refugees from the persecution of Louis XIV and others. Among my fellow campers were an Israeli Arab and a black American student from Alabama. We spent the evenings in discussion. The Israeli talked about what it was like to live as a marginalized person in Israel. The Alabaman and I, a South Carolina white boy, were asked to talk about segregation. I really didn’t know how to defend - or if it was defensible - the system in which I was schooled and lived. The next summer I went to work for James Robinson, director of Crossroads Africa and pastor of the Church of the Master in West Harlem. Black pastor, black congregation, and the creator of a program called Crossroads Africa. He prevailed in getting one of his parishioner families to take me in as a boarder for the summer. My hosts were a railroad porter and his wife who worked at home. After graduating from Davidson and doing a year at Union Theological Seminary in NYC, I embarked on a Peace Corps-like program in Dakar, Senegal. The sponsor was CIMADE (the Comite Intermouvement aupres des Evacues), an organization formed after World War II for settling refugees from eastern Europe in France; it was particularly active in the late 1950s at the height of the French war in Algeria. And CIMADE sent me to spend a week in Algiers and Medea, amid the curfews and explosions that marked the evening hours. Senegal was newly independent and governed by a bicephalic administration of Mamadou Dia and Leopold Senghor. I lived in Grand Dakar in a social center, trying to teach French, learn a bit of Wolof, and do youth work. At some point I read Cheikh Hamidou Kane’ss best seller, Aventure Ambigue. I was drawn to the character of Samba Diallo, trying to live up to Islamic and Futanke ideals amid the cultural intrusion of the French and French schools. Certainly Samba’ss setting in Futa Toro and Kane’s origins in Futa Toro had to be different from the craziness and westernness of the big city of Dakar - or at least so I thought. The next episode in my trajectory came in 1964, in the PhD program in African History at Columbia University, and living in NYC again. I studied with Graham Irwin, a Southeast Asian historian who had done a few years in newly independent Ghana and re-treaded as an Africanist. RESEARCH AFRICA REVIEWS Volume 4 (2020) Page 6 A few years later he was joined by Marcia Wright, a more bona fide Africanist working on East Africa. Somehow, after an African Studies conference, I also got adopted by Philip Curtin and spent a semester at Wisconsin alongside Joe Miller, Allen Isaacman, Paul Lovejoy and several others who would form the first generation of Africanist historians in the USA. Out there I started learning Pulaar and preparing for research in Futa Toro - alongside a more bona fide Curtin student named Jim Johnson. In 1967 Jim and I shared a penthouse apartment below the Marche Sandaga in Dakar for the next year or so. We were both working on Futa. It was a time in African history when the premium was placed on doing pre-colonial history of African states and societies - before the Europeans took over. We decided to divide up the area - west for Jim, centered on Podor, and east for me, centered on Matam. He ended up writing on the early Islamic regime or Almamate of Futa from the late 18th century, while I did the later period down to the French conquest in 1890. My inaugural trip to Futa was by boat, on the famous Abou El Moghdad, which sailed (or steamed) out of St. Louis up the Senegal River. It took several days to get to Matam. It featured a first class of Europeans and a deck class of Africans, in good old colonial style. I got off in Matam and imposed myself on two sons of the Futanke scholar Cheikh Moussa Kamara - Amadou and Moustapha. By that time, I had been working at IFAN, with the encouragement of Oumar Ba, a Mauritanian Futanke, and had been introduced to the works of Cheikh Moussa - especially the Zuhuur al-Basaatiin. The Kamara sons treated me well, made me feel at home, and introduced me around town. On my next trip I drove a bright red Deux Chevaux across the Ferlo, went to Matam and then to Thilogne, where I met Thierno Seydou Kane, tooroodo, hajj, former colonial chief, and grandson of Abdul Bokar Kane, who became the focus of my research. Thierno became my adopted father and my host in Thilogne. Some years later his son Moustapha came to study with me at Michigan State. From time to time Tierno Seydou suggested I convert to Islam, join the Tijaniyya and accompany him on a pilgrimage to Medina Gonasse. Equally or more important for me was meeting and bonding with Moussa Gueye, a burnaajo who had been working with Animation Rurale, the bottom-up mobilization program pushed by Mamadou Dia. Moussa became my constant companion as we drove around eastern Futa conducting interviews in Pulaar. His contacts, and his ability to inspire confidence, were invaluable as we created a precious set of interviews for the history of Futa in the 18th and 19th centuries. Jim worked away in western Futa and together we deposited open-reel copies of our cassettes at IFAN (where they unfortunately disappeared in a year’s time). Jim and I finished our dissertations on Futa and got teaching positions at Northwestern and Yale respectively. I revised my thesis and published it as Chiefs and Clerics. Abdul Bokar Kan and the History of Futa Toro in 1975. It featured Abdul Bokar, a bold, pragmatic and not very pious leader, not the Samba Diallo of Aventure Ambigue. I had also identified my next project, a history of the military jihad of al-hajj Umar, the famous native son of Futa. I had some hesitation and reservations about embarking on a work about Umar, partly because of the massive emigration that he organized from Futa and his transformation of the Islamic practice of many Futanke in the late 19th century. I had also absorbed some of the attitude and distance of Cheikh Moussa towards the military jihad, as opposed to the greater jihad of striving that Cheikh Babou symbolizes in his book about Amadou Bamba: Fighting the Greater Jihad. RESEARCH AFRICA REVIEWS Volume 4 (2020) Page 7 When I went back to Africa in 1976 and 1979, it was to Mali with only brief stops in Senegal. I was in pursuit of al-hajj Umar and his jihad, which was in areas within the confines of colonial Soudan and today’s Mali. At this time my funding came from a grant from the NEH that I had obtained along with Louis Brenner, a friend and colleague since my Columbia days. It called for the microfilming of Arabic manuscripts in Timbuktu, at the Centre Ahmed Baba where Mahmoud Zouber was the director. We constructed a board with strobes and a support for a camera which I transported to Timbuktu in 1979, and wrote a manual for usage in French for the system; I don’t think the system was ever used very much, but Louis and I had high hopes for it at the time. And Louis, my research companion from the days of the doctoral program at Columbia in the 1960s, went on to do his splendid work on Bandiagara and Tierno Bokar Tal.For my research on Umar, I went to Alpha Oumar Konare; then, I went to the head of the Institut des Sciences Humaines in Bamako helped me secure the services of Almamy Malik Yettara, a marvelous amateur historian with wonderful language skills and access to Niger, Segu, Mopti, Bandiagara, and the other centers where I needed to work - he filled the role that Moussa Gueye had occupied in Futa in the late 1960s. In Almamy’s case, he lives on in a splendid biography by Bernard Salvaing. In Bamako I enjoyed wonderful company and meals at the home of Alpha, his wife Adam Konare Ba and their family. In Segu I shared a house with Jim Bingen, then completing the research for his PhD in political science from UCLA, and he and I shared the wonderful meals that Madani Tal, a fourth generation descendant of Umar, would send over. I also met Richard Roberts, who was doing his dissertation research on the Middle Niger for the University of Toronto, and began a lifelong friendship with him.
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